I'm doing a research paper on you as an author. I have read many of
your books including Ender's Game and Songmaster. I was wondering whether
you were attempting to make a statement about children, and the effects of being
pushed too hard (growing up before they are ready). I was just wondering whether
you were making some kind of statement.

-- Submitted by Ellena Fickett

OSC REPLIES: - April 26, 2000

I wasn't "making a statement," I was telling a story -- but it was a story
about children being pushed too hard into adult roles. I've seen it many times, in
the lives of friends and of ancestors who live on in family lore: When a child
takes on adult responsibility too early, it deprives the child of vital stages of
development. Often such children, when they grow up, are torn between the need
to be responsible and the yearning to have the irresponsibility and freedom of
adolescence, which is an important stage of life. I am impatient with the way that
children are constantly the victims of our national moods and the guinea pigs of
our experiments. Right now my kindergartner is being given homework, for
heaven's sake, and has to make up any work she misses because of illness or
family trips. This is kindergarten! Have these adults lost their minds? But ... in
the effort to "improve" education, "more homework" has become the mantra, with
the result that at every grade level children are being given homework to excessive
degrees, merely to make up for the REAL problems, which include parental
noninvolvement, lack of discipline in the schools, bad or distracted teaching, and
poor course design -- among others. Children are also the primary victims of our
national experiment with quick-and-easy divorce and meaningless marriages -- all
children, not just the children of divorced parents. The irony is that any culture
that intends to survive into the next generation must be very good and winning the
allegiance of the next generation to that culture -- but we seem bent on making our
children hate the culture in which they were raised. It doesn't bode well for the
future of the American community.

But is that my "statement" in Ender's Game? No. It's my statement here in
this answer to your question. In Ender's Game, I was simply exploring a
believable (to me) situation in which sending children to war is believed to be
necessary for the survival of the human species, and what the costs of such a
situation might be on some of the key characters involved. I was following where
the story led. It is only afterward that I can find "statements" that might validly be
made about the story. And those statements are only valid to the degree that I was
following my unconscious beliefs in the process of writing the story rather than
trying to bend the story to fit my conscious beliefs. But now we're getting
perilously close to the realm of philosophy ...